This invention relates to a method for providing animal care and facilitating the safety of animals and animal handlers.
Domesticated animals, animals under scientific study, or animals in zoos are often in stressful situations including veterinary exams, grooming or loading for transport that may cause a fear response due to associations of pain, stress or anxiety with these events. Early socialization and desensitization with rewards and positive reinforcers helps animals experience these situations in a positive way, resulting in calm behavior. This calm behavior and compliance assists the performance of important actions prior to and during treatment and handling such as loading the animal onto a trailer or table and encouraging the animal to stand still for exam. This compliance is important because it prevents possible injury to the animal and its handlers. Many animals will comply with an otherwise stressful situation if they know that they will be rewarded.
When an animal has not been socialized or desensitized to certain care and handling procedures, there is often an associated fear response in the animal due to the pain, overstimulation and unpredictability of the situation. The fear response can cause the animal to react in a fight or flight manner exhibited by kicking, biting, scratching or jumping. These behaviors risk injury to the animal as well as the handler. Use of force to handle the animal often will escalate their fear and response, increasing the likelihood of injury. Behaviorists recommend desensitizing animals to stressful situations such as veterinary exams or transport. Using positive reinforcement for care decreases the reactivity of the animal. For example, the assistant can give a tasty treat to the animal, waiting until they are calm before the veterinarian gives an injection. A desensitized animal will continue to consume the treat, or be distracted during the injection, rather than flinching and turning their head in an attempted or actual bite.
Care handlers and animal owners have used rewards and positive reinforcers to help desensitize animals to these situations which often trains the animal to behave calmly during exams, care, and handling. Consistently providing the animal with customized positive reinforces that are known to be effective helps to ensure that they are more reliably calm during exams, care and handling. For example, when the same treat (positive reinforcer) is used in the same way each time the animal is loaded into their carrier, the animal is calm due to the predictability of the handling, setting and treat. These animals are less likely to react in ways that may cause themselves or handlers excess harm.
In addition to providing the animal with a form of treat, veterinary care professionals and animal owners also use certain environmental mechanisms and tools to desensitize and calm an animal during a stressful procedure. Certain animals might not like to be lifted onto a table and would prefer to be treated on the ground or in the arms of a technician. Other animals might respond more positively to being covered in or supported by a towel or blanket. Additionally, certain chemicals that serve as the synthetic analogs to appeasing animal pheromones, such as DAP for dogs and Feliway for cats, can be used to calm and comfort the animal.
DAP is the synthetic analog of the appeasing pheromone that the mother dog produces to calm her puppies so that they will nurse. Adult dogs still have the receptors for the DAP in their brain. DAP in the air, or in contact with objects around a dog, helps calm the dog. It decreases fear moderately to greatly depending on how sensitive the dog is to DAP, and how escalated the dog is when DAP is used.
Feliway is the synthetic analog of the facial pheromones of the cat. When Feliway is sprayed on surfaces, the cat feels like it has marked those areas and accepted them. This helps the car to feel less anxious about the space that they are in.
Animals often will visit various care givers in the same care situation, such as exams by different veterinarians or grooming by different groomers whereby the animal will be exposed to similar stresses. In each situation, different rewards or no rewards at all might be offered for an exam, resulting in an unpredictable experience for the animal. Problems arise when inconsistent positive reinforcement is given to the animal in various care situations. An offered treat may be rewarding, but not as predictable and this can increase or fail to reduce anxiety in the animal. This is opposed to a situation where each caregiver has a means of knowing how to predictably calm and offer customized positive reinforcement to the animal, thereby triggering an innate calming response. Currently there is no system or method of documenting customized reinforcers used to desensitize individual animals for their care.